This paper elucidates the rights violations caused by mass formal schooling systems and explores what students may do about them. Students have rights not to be harmed and rights to liberty (not to be oppressed), as well as attendant rights to (proportionately) defend their rights if necessary. For some time now, education has been dominated by mass formal schooling systems that harm and oppress many students. Such harm and oppression violate those students’ rights not to be harmed or oppressed, which (...) may justify student nonviolent defensive (or rights-protecting) action. (shrink)

Children have always been an essential part of politics. However, the political struggles in which children are involved are rarely, if at all, for the equality of children as such. Struggles for the benefit of children are nearly always led by adults, focusing on children’s rights in an adult-dominated world. In this paper, I develop the possibility of Children’s political struggle for equality, informed by the political philosophy of Jacque Rancière. I present the educational backdrop for Rancière’s claim that all (...) intelligences are equal, and argue that it implies that children are by nature equal to adults, hence also equally capable of political action. By demonstrating that children are a “part of those who have no part” in the existing sociopolitical order, I examine the possibility of a collective political subject of children, and articulate the implications child politics may have. (shrink)

In this paper we take as our starting point Greta Thunberg’s message to an audience of adults at a recent climate change summit: ‘This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!’ We take Thunberg at her word and endeavour to investigate what is wrong and how it might be wrong. Through this investigation we (...) consider how education may be implicated in the problem to which Thunberg alludes: a problem about both climate change and intergenerational change. We draw upon Hannah Arendt’s seminal work, ‘A Crisis in Education’, to consider how an ecological crisis coincides with an educational crisis symptomatic of an inversion of the traditional adult and child relationship in which education serves to introduce the young to the world – a public world, which is distinct from the ecological world. Arendt’s position on education, we argue, reveals concerns that movements like School Strike for Climate expose young people prematurely to the risks of indoctrination that attend adult, public life, and hinders their renewal of the world. Science too may add to these risks. (shrink)